Matthew Cobb

speaker

579 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 7 Dec

Matthew Cobb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Ground Truths · The Story of Francis Crick, a new masterpiece biography by Matthew Cobb · 7 Dec 2025 podcast

And there's Matt Ridley's much briefer, very polished, written very soon after Crick died.

And they both interviewed Crick loads of times, which I never did.

I never met him.

But they didn't pick up on this.

And indeed, none of his colleagues who knew him very well who are still living

I'd ever had any idea of this connection.

So in 1959, Crick is there finishing a sabbatical in America.

He's staying in Berkeley, and he goes into San Francisco.

They go to the City Lights bookstore, which is still there, the heart of the beat movement, and he goes, because he's interested in poetry, he goes down into the basement, which is where all the poems are, and he finds this long broadsheet, this thing that is, I mean, it's huge.

This very strange poem written by this guy called Michael McClure.

And it's called Peyote Poem.

And it describes the effects of eating peyote, which is the active ingredient of which is mescaline.

So just as Aldous Huxley had written, you know, The Doors of Perception about six years earlier.

What McClure is doing is giving a very vivid poetic expression to it.

And Crick is utterly entranced by this very strange piece of poetry.

Buys this very now extremely rare document, takes it home, pins it on the wall.

Later on, it's next to a copy of the genetic code, which he helped to crack.

And so this is, I thought, this is astonishing.

This is what is going on here.

And in fact, he ends up very good friends with McClure.

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